Splint
by hemilikapi
Summary: When Johnny recalls part of his past, does he continue on his quest for desensitization, or give in to his almost obsessive desire to remember? What if he loses what he knows to be himself in the process?
1. Humanly Needs

It was that time again, Johnny realized with loathing, putting on a scowl. The tufts of hair still remaining on his head were slick and greasy, retaining an unusual sheen. When he ran his fingers through them, his fingers felt uncomfortably oily.

"You reek, 'Nny," he heard Reverend Meat's gravelly voice from where he sat at his desk.

He stood, feeling his skin stick together a bit at his armpit. A groan swelled in his throat, but he didn't release it. Any signs of unhappiness sent Meat on a rant about how he had to indulge, grow fat on temporary pleasure. "What do you know? You don't even have a nose," he said, lifting the strange figure and throwing him into his open closet.

"That should say something to you," Meat said, not reacting at all to what, to something living, would be rather painful. "Take a shower."

"What you smell is dread," Johnny said, casting a cold glare down at Meat before slamming the closet door shut, locking it.

He paced, running slim fingers along his bristly scalp. His hair was growing back, he noted, wasn't sure what to think of that. Wasn't sure if he thought anything at all. Why couldn't he just be indifferent? Why was he plagued with these opinions, these emotions, these… Humanly needs? They all came with being human, he figured. A packaged deal.

Oh how he wished he weren't human.

Seriously, out of the billions of other organisms he could have been born as, been part of the consciousness of, he was human. He was Johnny C.. Out of all the people and cats and dogs and lizards and insects and plants and protists and bacteria he could have been, he was Johnny C..

His rotten luck.

Johnny placed his hands on his ears, but it didn't help with the noise, with Meat's voice chanting, _Bathe, bathe, bathe,_ inside his head. He knew, he _knew _it was all inside his head. But how come, then, Meat's voice sounded muffled behind the closet door? Why couldn't he shut him up? If it was all in his head?

He stormed into the hallway, but Reverend Meat's rung out just as strong, if not stronger than before. What annoyed him most about it was that the voices were loud enough it felt like he was hearing them in his ears, and he could have been, but he could hear it in his mind, too. Fingernails on the inside of his skull.

He threw open the bathroom door, slammed it shut behind him, and silenced the Burger Boy by curling his fingers below the hem of his shirt and pulling up. He was immediately greeted by the cold, accompanied by the desire to pull his shirt back on. But 'Nny kept going, unbuckling both his boots and slipping them off.

Turning the water on, hot enough to turn his paper white skin tomato red. Batting his hand into the shower to test the temperature. Watching the leftover blood on the walls of the tub run down, a scarlet whirlpool around the drain, and then closing his eyes before opening the clasp on his belt. Unzipping. Dropping it all to his ankles and entering blindly. Closing the shower curtain behind him, encasing himself in hot water.

He just stood there for a moment, comforted by the heat. He loved how it felt on his arms, his neck, his closed eyelids. But admitting that to Reverend Meat was the same as admitting defeat.

Besides, there were plenty of things he didn't like about showering. Plenty of things he hated.

Like being naked, for one. Just as many people liked to think of themselves as the face they see in the mirror, and not the organs beneath the skin, Johnny did not like to think about the skin beneath the clothes.

It was why he closed his eyes. Anything beneath his clothes was not something he liked to think of as part of himself, or even something he liked at all. He was ugly. The human body was ugly.

Johnny reached for the soap, absently running it over his torso, along his arms.

He'd stopped taking regular showers around the same time he'd stopped regularly killing. He didn't have to scrub blood from his skin every day, he no longer knew when to shower until he was incredibly uncomfortable. It was one of the many prices he paid for trying to cut down.

Another was rage. With nowhere to release it, Johnny couldn't quell his anger. And with even more time to himself than before, it would just simmer there in his mind. He dwelled. He dwelled on it all for the longest time, and it'd bubble up, fill him up, and then it would crisp, leaving him with nothing but ashes. Leaving him empty. And when he did kill, the anger remained, unsatisfied, still boiling inside him.

Maybe he should take up a new hobby. Like painting, or arson.

He wondered if, indirectly, the end of the wall monster, Johnny's release, had brought this emptiness upon him. The amount of free will he suddenly found himself with was overwhelming. He didn't know what to do with it all, and he didn't know how to budget his own time anymore. He felt like an actor who was being weaned from the script. No, an actor who was told, _To hell with the script, just wing it_.

He squirted a quarter-sized blob of shampoo into the palm of his hand, placed the bottle back on the shelf, and began to scrub into his scalp. He often took too much, forgetting how little hair he had now.

He hated it all. He hated bathing and eating and _sleeping_, what wastes of time. If a person is expected to get eight hours of sleep every day, and there were twenty-four hours in a day, that was an eighth of a person's life, spent _sleeping_! How primitive, when there were so many other things we could _do _with that time! Life was short enough as is, and yet people were _designed_ to throw it all away.

Johnny wished he could just be a disembodied mind. Not a brain, a mind. Not physical matter, just thought and memory. Just leaving him to his thoughts, leaving him alone to think.

He'd given up on wishing for death. He knew what lay beyond the grave, and it wasn't in the least what he'd hoped for. …He'd hoped for an ephemeral life leading up to evanescence. For what he liked to think of as eternal apnea, an end of breath, of sight, and… even of thought. As much as he'd have liked to keep his thoughts in this ideal death, he knew they did more harm to him than good, in the end. He just wanted an end to existence. More importantly, to an existence shared with other people.

But now he knew that was not the case, that you continued existing through death, as yourself, and Johnny just wanted to abandon this pathetic little body, this pathetic little life with its pathetic humanly needs.

He turned off the shower and found himself, once again, caressed by the cold, and the silence. The shower curtain made a rattley noise as he opened it. He stepped out of the tub, dripping onto the floor tiles. He grabbed a towel off the floor and wrapped it around himself. Finally, he opened his eyes. And the moment he did, the silence was broken.

It was a sound, barely audible, but a mix between stomping and shuffling across a wooden floor. Johnny looked at his clothes, in a wrinkled heap on the floor. The noise sounded again, this time followed by a thud, and Nny abandoned his clothes there on bathroom floor, scuttling out into the hallway wearing only the towel he clasped at his hips.

Opening the door, greeted by silence. By darkness. Flicking on the lights. Feeling like the only sound in all the world was the sound of his gulp, ringing out crystal clear in the nothing. Taking a step forward, bare feet sliding against wood. Taking another step forward. Lifting Reverend Meat off the floor. Finding that he had been sitting atop a Polaroid photo. Looking at the figure, his silence.

But he would always remember setting Meat down, getting onto his knees, and viewing that photo, that photo that, in a way, would change him forever, if that change hadn't been inside him all along.


	2. Genesis

Johnny's lips parted with surprise. He fell to his knees, releasing a ragged breath. "This is…" He murmured, overcome with…

Memory.

He was seventeen. Or was he sixteen? …We'll say sixteen and a half. Johnny was sixteen and a half.

He was dark. They said it made him cool. It was just how he was. They just taught him how to dress like it: black, stripes, boots. And then he was cool, apparently.

And then they were his friends, apparently.

The girl in the picture's name was Genesis. They all called her Genna, or sometimes just Gen. Like all the rest, she didn't realize how well she fit in, with her combat boots and hair dye and facial piercings. Only how much she was shut out. It was that that Johnny hated about his _friends_.

But Gen was different… There was something that had drawn him to her.

It wasn't the piercings, the hair, the clothes, or the tattoos. If it were that, Johnny would have been attracted to every single one of them. It wasn't the dark poetry, or the thick eyeliner, the fingerless gloves or her taste for loud, angry music.

He couldn't remember the exact trait. That piece of the story escaped him. But…

She had called him, "different from the others." The best thing anyone ever said to him in that _hell_ people called _adolescence_. Maybe in his life. He wasn't another one of them, their boots and hair and piercings. He wasn't just another _human_, wallowing in selfishness like a pig in slop. He wasn't, he was _different_.

And then he moved.

And that was all he could build on from the picture.

But that was not the end of that. Memory was not the only thing the photo had brought on. Johnny… upon remembering her, also remembered how he felt about her, and then he was feeling it. He was actually _feeling _it, wriggling inside him like a hungry worm.

Forgotten, reawakened… _Affection._

That had to be it. _Affection._ Imagine that! Feeling affection for a girl he hadn't seen in… Well, who knew how long? Johnny wasn't one for calendars. It was like a countdown to the day you die, and Johnny was through with wanting to die.

Johnny took another glance at the picture, this time really looking at this girl… Her eyes were black as coal. Her hair as red as flame, but not naturally.

She wasn't thin. Wasn't fat, either, but she definitely wasn't thin. She was… Thick, he supposed, had a healthy amount of meat on her bones, though one could say she looked like a walrus next to Johnny, who was incredibly scrawny in that picture, though not as scrawny as he was now. That was back when he was a lean, skinny boy, as opposed to a gaunt, boney man.

But back to Gen. She had two piercings in the top of her left ear, as well as two on the back of her eyebrow and one on her nose. She sported a black t-shirt with a familiar band logo printed across the chest. She was almost unnaturally pale, but that was coming from Johnny, who was also… Unnaturally pale, so you should probably disregard that last comment. Her thick black eye makeup stood out against the pallor of her skin, and her lips… Those lips brought him back. They were red like blood, and if Johnny remembered correctly… Cherry-flavored.

It was like the worms in his intestines had blossomed into the butterflies in his stomach. Or maybe they were moths. Johnny didn't care.

In fact, he wanted his stomach fumigated. All these feelings, these insects inside him. They weren't his. They belonged to teenage Johnny, who he'd lost long ago. That's what he kept telling himself, but his mind lingered on her, his eyes on the picture.

He'd try to think of something else, to look away, but his mind, his eyes would always flick back.

His hands shook a bit. A drop of water fell from his hair onto the photo. "No!" He cried, and tried, frantically, to wipe it off. It had ruined the ink, left the circular splotch where the droplet had landed on Gen's face with a bleached look, the area around it dark with smear.

Frustrated, Johnny hurled the photo to the floor and crushed it beneath his foot, causing the photo to stick to his wet heel. He'd forgotten that he wasn't wearing his boots. Johnny swore, tore the photo off his sole and ripped it in half, throwing it at Meat in defiance. "Fuck you!" He cried, stomping his foot for emphasis. His towel slid off his hips onto the floor.

And with that his eyes snapped shut; he threw his hands over them for extra coverage. The tears still seeped through his fingers.

He wasn't sure if he could hear Reverend Meat's laughter, or if he was imagining it. He was always imagining it, though, right? Meat was just a voice from his subconscious, laughing at his tears, his frustration… His nakedness. But when he gathered up his towel and opened his eyes, Meat was only mocking him with his silence.

Dazed and somewhat warily, Johnny left for the bathroom, for his clothes, leaving inky footprints as he went.

**Sorry for the kind of crappy chapter. I'll try to make the next one better, I promise!**

**Also, a mistake I notice with the last chapter… I accidentally said, "one eighth," at one point where I meant to say, "one third." Whoops. Anyway, thank you everyone for the comments, and for reading my story! It means a lot.**


	3. Splint

**Disclaimer- (I figure I should start using these…) None of the characters from Jhonen Vasquez's **_**Johnny the Homicidal Maniac**_** belong to me. I am not profiting from this story; I am writing it for recreational purposes and writing practice only. I am not, nor will I ever be, Jhonen Vasquez. Thank you.**

"Mr. Samsa," Johnny muttered, trying his best to… coo. He figured it sounded creepy coming from him, but it was worth a try. "Why don't you be a good little roach and… Come here?"

Mr. Samsa didn't budge, though his antennae twitched.

"I know you hear me, Mr. Samsa," Johnny said, a little exasperated. A little put out. "Come here, Mr. Samsa, please? I promise not to squish you today. I promise, I promise, I promise."

Again, Mr. Samsa refused. His will power was astonishing, as always.

"With all my heart, I promise you," he was whispering now, desperate. "Come. Here, Mr. Samsa." He needed to try something else.

He set his fingers down on the table, index and middle, like the legs of a little person… A little person without a neck for its head, without a head for its face, and nubs where its ankles should be. Nonetheless, he made this little hand-person totter forward to greet Mr. Samsa. "Hello Mr. Samsa," he said, giving the hand-person a squeaky little voice.

Mr. Samsa inched backwards.

"No, no, Mr. Samsa," Johnny hissed, progressing his hand forward, closer to him. "Mr. Samsa, today, I'm your friend!" Mr. Samsa began to scuttle away from his fingertips. "God d- DAMMIT, Mr. Samsa!" He cried. "I'm sick! SICK! Of your holier-than-thou ATTITUDE! Fed. The fuck. UP!" The hand-person fell apart, and Johnny reassembled it into a fist, dropping it onto him like a hammer on a nail. His exoskeleton crushed easily beneath it, like it always did. "See, Mr. Samsa," he rasped as he smeared him across the table. "That's the difference between you and I. You may be immortal, but every. Time. You return… You're no stronger than before. You," and he chuckled a bit here, "Hah, haha, hah, never_ learn_, do you? Hahaha, while I adapt, you can only just _continue_. The same Mr. Samsa for _aaaall _eternity. Hah! It's funny, isn't it, how my strengths are your weaknesses, and vice versa? How we'll keep trying to be more like each other in a useless struggle?" The laughter had died by then. He fell to his knees, looked at the side of his hand, and then to the floor. He leaned over the table, almost pressing his lips against the wood next to the chartreuse smear, and whispered, "Come back soon, Mr. Samsa, please… We'll try again. I'm so sorry."

~xxx~

Reverend Meat had been silent for days, and like the pathetic human he was, Johnny quickly found himself _lonely_. And as ridiculous as it was, that Johnny could stand up to hunger, to thirst, to _sleep_, but he couldn't fight loneliness, he found it to be true. He was so lonely, he sought companionship in Mr. Samsa, of all creatures.

He thought of Nail-Bunny often, and tried to have little conversations with him in his head, using Nail-Bunny's soothing voice, and it did that, it soothed him, but nothing more. He found no satisfaction in this. He knew that, even if Nail-Bunny had been a voice from his own mind, he hadn't created him consciously, and he would never be able to.

Nail-Bunny was gone for good.

And he found everything he'd worked for crumble away. It began with nibbling, but he found himself _binging_. Even though most of his food was stale by then, he ate it all to fill a void.

The silence. The silence created by the lack of voices was unnerving him, screwing up everything. He wasn't used to being left in the silence, the only voice being that of his own thoughts.

He was cracking further, a feat he had thought impossible, his insanity twisting and contorting unpredictably. There was no telling what it'd become, what'd he'd become, what his now impressionable mentality would warp into.

A long week of silence had passed rather painfully. Maybe he could have gone longer, but at that point he was out of food, and, as it always did eventually, that forced him out of the house.

~ooo~

The Supermarket. _Super._

Spoon-fed, ungrateful little brats tugging on their mommy's sleeves, begging for candy, or useless toys. Temporary gratification. Meat would have liked them. They were the type of people_ Johnny,_ on the other hand,would have loved to disembowel.

Johnny wheeled a squeaky cart through automatic doors, contemplating what to get. What he _wanted_, as much as he hated the very _concept _of _want_. There were so many things he wanted, now that he found himself succumbing to himself.

He got fruit, and all sorts of vegetables. Bread, meats, cheeses. Chocolate. _Meat would be proud, _he thought with disgust, as well as severe disappointment in himself. In his will power.

Oddly enough, he wasn't in the mood for a brain-freezy, or even a cherry fiz-wiz. Johnny needed something… Something substantial.

In line, waiting for a woman to unload two carts full of food onto the exhausted black conveyor belt, he eyed his own food hungrily, practically drooling. It all looked so good.

_ "This looks so good!"_ He heard his own voice, a little less concrete than it was presently. He blinked, and he saw Genesis, sitting at the other end of the table, grinning ear to ear, her cheeks rosy.

_"Taste it,"_ she urged eagerly.

Looking down, he saw carbonara, with a side of garlic bread, with another side of Caesar salad. It looked and smelled great. _"I don't even know where to begin,"_ he heard himself again. _"This is amazing."_

_"For you," _said Gen, dramatically, _"It's nothing."_

_ "Oh, Madam," _he continued the act, _"How can I ever repay you for this generous meal?"_

_ "It's nothing, sir."_

"Sir?" He looked up. It was the nasally cashier. "Sir, it's your turn to load your groceries up."

Johnny nodded. "Uh, sorry, my apologies."

"Whatever."

Johnny squinted at him, but took a deep breath and focused on hauling out his groceries.

~ooo~

It was the bookstore where he'd met Devi. Looking in the shop window, he could see that she wasn't there, but he went inside anyway. Plucking a book on cooking off the shelf, checking it out… Sitting on the bench outside and cracking it open.

But being there made him think of Devi.

He still… Liked Devi, didn't he? Like, _really_ liked her?

_"I've got a secret." _He looked over, and Genesis was sitting next to him on the bench, eyes hidden by her downturned lashes. A bashful little smile on her cherry red lips, with maybe a hint of mischief hidden in their corners. "_I really like you."_

_ "Uh, really?"_ He cringed as his voice cracked on the word "really," and she snickered at him. He heard himself clear his throat. _"I uh, um... Really?" _He managed it that time.

She nodded a tiny bit. Her mesmerizing charcoal eyes met his, but he found himself watching her lips part to form the words, _"Anything else you'd like to say to that?" _…then her fingers as they slid onto his, falling and fitting easily in the creases between them, then back to her lips as they met his.

He actually closed his eyes, bracing for sweet, cherry impact. But he felt nothing.

When Johnny opened his eyes, the memory had left him. He shook his head as if to clear it, and returned to browsing through his cookbook.

Running his thumb across his lips a couple times, he thought, _Maybe it's better if I move on, for me, and for Devi._

~ooo~

Johnny returned home, feeling less lonely than when he'd left. Genesis was filling a void inside him, or at least memories of her were.

That's right, they were only memories. Johnny couldn't allow himself to get sucked up in them… She was gone. Well. At least he was certain he wasn't about to see her again. He was… Almost completely certain about that.

Damn it.

He was falling for a girl he knew only in memory.

Reverend Meat still taunted him with his silence. Right when Johnny had questions for him, he had to go quiet, didn't he?

Suddenly, he thought of something he'd said to him once, _"You don't remember the pretty girl that gave me to you? Being in her room? Doing what you did? What she did to you?"_

And it all came back to him. He was in her room, creeping out from under her covers. She grabbed his wrist, her slightly chewed fingernails pressing into his skin. She looked up at him, part of her face still buried in her pillow, her drowsy charcoal eyes telling him to stay. _"Go back to sleep,"_ he whispered affectionately.

She shook her head. _"'Even s__leep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life…'"_

Johnny blinked. _"Who said that?"_

_"Virginia Woolf."_

_ "Who?"_

_ "I dunno, I heard it somewhere, once."_

He thought about the quote for a minute, nodded slowly as he took it in, a smile forming in the corners of his mouth as he appreciated it. Then he leant over to kiss her forehead. _"Go back to sleep."_

_ "Stay the night, 'Nny," _she pleaded, tugging on his sleeve.

_"Your parents would kill me."_

_ "What does it matter," _he cringed as her voice cracked on the word "matter," and when he looked at her face from a lower angle, he saw her tears. _"You're moving tomorrow, anyway."_

He bit his lip. _"Hey… Come on…" _He placed a hand on her cheek. _"We… had fun tonight, right? We don't need-"_

_ "But what if we never see each other again?" _She was squeaking and snorting between sobs. Johnny tried to shush her, they couldn't wake her parents, but she continued, _"Johnny, we're never going to see each other again, and we've never, we'll never-"_

_ "Tonight was a night to remember, though, wasn't it? A good night to leave off on?"_

She shook her head. _"'Nny," _she whispered, clearer than before, fending off the sobs. _"I won't be able to live with myself if I never sleep with you."_

Johnny shook his head. _"I can't." _It wasn't right, and to be honest, Johnny wasn't ready for it. Doing… _it_.

_"Don't you love me?"_

Johnny scowled abruptly, and found himself speaking in a low growl when he said, _"Why would you ever doubt that?"_

_"'Nny, you know I didn't mean-"_

_ "No, I don't know, obviously," _he said, still growling. _"Enlighten me."_

_ "Don't talk to me that way."_

_ "I don't know how else to talk to you!" _He groaned with exasperation. _"How can I talk to you to get you to listen?" _She looked up at him, letting go of his sleeve. She looked… Apologetic, and that was enough for him.

Johnny sighed, took a seat on her bed. _"…Truthfully, if we're never going to see each other again, well. There's nothing we can do about that. What will happen will happen, and… Well. I don't want to sleep with you because I don't want to leave off like that. I'm not going to sleep with someone who I'm never going to see again. It'll just make things harder than they need to be. Call it selfish if you want, but I think it's just practical."_

There was a moment's pause, and then she smirked. _"You are _so_ not a teenage boy, Johnny C."_

_ "Pardon?"_

_ "Here you have a girl practically _begging _to get into your pants, and you turn her down," _she shook her head with mock scorn. _"It's un-American!"_

He had to place his hand over his mouth to muffle the sound of his amusement. _"Why thank you, thank you very much." _There was another brief pause, and then Johnny leaned over and kissed her. Quick but tender. When he pulled away, he took her hand and asked, _"Do you love me?"_

Her eyes were shiny, lustrous, chatoyant, like obsidian instead of charcoal. _"Yes,"_ she whispered, squeezing his hand in hers. _"Of course."_

He squeezed back. _"Just checking." _He kissed her cheek and stood.

_"Wait, Johnny," _he turned towards her voice. In the dark, he watched her lift something off the ground and hold it out for him. He took it in both hands, examined it, puzzled by the strange gift.

_"A Bub's Burger Boy?"_

_ "Look on the bottom when you get to your new house," _she said, a sort of embarrassed, shy, but at the same time mischievous smile spreading across her cheeks, like the tail of a scarlet comet.

He nodded. _"Come say good-bye in the morning, before I leave."_

_ "Okay."_

He got halfway across her room before looking over his shoulder, getting what he knew would be his last real look at her, and she looked right back. He could hardly even make out her shape in the darkness, but one side of her face was illuminated in the moonlight. He wanted to remember that sliver of face forever.

Finally he closed his eyes, turned away. Managed a, _"Bye," _got one in reply, then hopped out her window, Burger Boy clamped beneath his arm. Though he'd managed not to do it in her room, he teared up on the way home.

He rubbed his eyes, hating his involuntary tears with a passion. When he managed the blink away the last of them, he was back in the room, Reverend Meat staring back. He still had the feeling he was laughing at him, mocking him silently. It unnerved him.

This whole ordeal unnerved him. Genesis and Reverend Meat both stood for and represented the same things: Succumbing to one's whims, one's desires, one's needs. _Reverting. _But Johnny wasn't about to become anyone's slave, not even his own. Not again.

Johnny wanted with every ounce of his being, the one thing he would allow himself to _want_, to abandon such things, to abandon what it meant, the very essence of what it meant, to be human. To shake off that terrible association he had with such a pitiful race. Such _ignorance_ and _stupidity._

Genesis, and the past he associated her with, threatened this. Like a splint, holding the bone in place long enough for it to heal, to go back to… _normal_. If he continued like this, remembering, eating, _loving_, there was no going back. Not unless he were to break again. But would fixed Johnny want to break again? Johnny didn't know, because he wasn't that Johnny.

Which brought about the question: What did Johnny want? Desensitization or the Splint?

He ran his fingers along his bristly scalp. He was beginning to get a headache. He squeezed his head in hope of ending the throb, but with no such luck.

Sighing, he looked up, remembering Meat's presence in front of him. Reluctantly, he reached for the figure, lifted him up, and flipped him upside down.

Written in faded Sharpie marker, the message beneath him read, _"You'll always have a place in my heart." _Below it was a phone number. Her phone number.

~ooo~

_"You'll always have a place in my heart."_

Kind of corny, when Johnny really thought about it, but… It was fitting, Johnny felt, and it touched him and the heart he thought he'd abandoned, discarded… Figuratively, of course. That needed to be cleared up, considering how insane our main character is. The things he might try to rid himself of that pesky beating. So, yes, figuratively discarded. Of course.

"I looked her up, Mr. Samsa," Johnny murmured, partially to himself. He just needed to hear a voice, even if it was only his own. "I looked up the number, found the address. She still lives in that house."

Mr. Samsa was quiet. He reminded Johnny of a deer caught in headlights. "Cat got your tongue, Mr. Samsa?" He snickered. "Oh, pardonnez-moi, Monsier Samsa. I forget sometimes that you speak a language I can't even hear, let alone understand. I forget that you don't even have a tongue to begin with. _Je suis désolé_._"_

_ "They say you can catch more flies with honey," _Johnny wasn't even surprised to find himself in Genesis's kitchen, watching her slather some of honey on a plate. _"Or something like that."_ She set the plate down on the floor and squatted. Johnny squatted with her.

It wasn't too long, not too short, either, before he saw them, hesitating before scuttling across the tiled kitchen floor. A black mob of _ants_, hungry ants, gathering together for one purpose.

When the golden mass turned a squirming black, she eased a cup over it, continuing to lift the entire plate onto the counter. She peered through the glass, like a child at the zoo, running her finger up and down along its side. _"When the honey's gone, they'll panic, trample and eat one another… Until one is left standing," _she said nonchalantly, then glancing at him, _"And even that one, if it doesn't starve, too, will suffocate." _She snickered once, then turned her attention back to her ants.

And it was then that Johnny remembered what drew him to her: In all her loveliness, she was ugly. In all her charisma, she was sadistic. In all her _perfection, _she was fucked up. Just like Johnny.

Not to say these were traits he admired in himself, but when he looked at Genesis, he saw someone relatable. Someone he wasn't constantly comparing himself to.

Johnny dipped his hand in the jar, hopeful and determined, and lay it on the table.

Mr. Samsa came forward, timidly, to eat the golden honey off Johnny's fingers. A smile formed in the corners of his mouth, and it lingered for a couple long moments as he let the cockroach taste his skin, let him settle in, get comfortable, but it slowly grew into a grin as he, just as slowly, closed his fingers around the insect.

His legs squirmed in his grip, insect feet spinning pointless circles against his palm, getting more vigorous as Johnny lifted him into the air, still spinning when Johnny dropped him into an empty shoebox. He righted himself, then stood very still. Terrified.

"Good day to you, sir." Johnny taped the box closed, isolating Mr. Samsa in darkness.

~ooo~

Todd nursed a bruised cut on his cheek, squeezing it like he could squeeze out all the blood, make it stop bleeding. He didn't like it. It was scary, all those organs and fluids inside him that he couldn't see. Processes he didn't even know about, half of it he had no control over.

There was a part of him he'd probably never know, and it terrified him.

He looked down at the bear on his lap and decided to squeeze him instead. "You're wrong, Shmee," he said, face clenched up, making little canals in his face for his blood and tears to run through. "Daddy loves me, he _has _to. That's just what Daddy's do…"

"Not necessarily."

Todd nearly jumped at unexpected reply. His eyes snapping open, he was greeted with the sight of the scary neighbor man, who he hadn't seen or… _heard _from in months.

"I've found that people don't have to do anything, if they don't want to," he said with a shrug. "Fate is a dumb myth, a superstition. Free will's what it's all about." He nodded, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms across his chest. "Anyway, long time no see, eh?"

Todd was speechless.

Johnny waited a moment before continuing, "I, uh. This is a little abrupt, disappearing for months, and stuff, then coming back… Well. Thing is, I'm… going on another 'trip.' And I'd like you to come with me." Johnny made a sort of "tah-dah" motion with his hands. "How about it?"

Todd opened his mouth to say no, to turn him away forever, but stopped himself. Closing his mouth, he thoughtfully touched the cut on his cheek. After gnawing on his lip for a moment, he looked up and simply nodded.

Johnny grinned, pleasantly surprised. "Really? You'll come?"

Again, he just nodded in reply.

Johnny took him in his arms, squeezing him gratefully. "Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!" And so quickly Todd didn't get the chance to resist, Johnny lifted him off the ground and onto his shoulders. "You're simply the best Squee ever, you know that, right?" He smiled, and added, "Such a good little Squee!" just before hopping out the window, screaming Squee and all.

**Sorry this took so long… I've been busy, sick, writer's blocked… You name it. Not to mention this chapter is relatively big, so it would have taken longer, anyway. But: Yeah. Sorry about that.**

**I'd also just like to apologize for the kind of shittiness of this chapter. I… Had fun writing the flashbacks, but flashbacks are kind of just… Writing no-no's. Not. A. Good. Idea. In the least. I feel I pulled it off as best I could though. And there are some scenes I like in this chapter… There's just a lot I also don't like. Ah well. Next chapter will be shorter.**

**Also! I drew the photo of Gen and 'Nny. It's on my Deviantart. Just look up Hemilikapi, it's under the JTHM folder in my Gallery. Check it out, bros! (Now to end this painfully long Author's Note. I bid you adieu!)**

**-hemilikapi**


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